A new 'ism'

> Social Complexity

Many elements of the occupied mind play into this piece of the puzzle. You might call it occupyism, but it's something new and not yet fully understood.

Yuval Noah Harari: Nationalism vs. globalism: the new political divide. Positive Thinking in a Dark Age. The Serendipity of Streams. A stream is simply a life context formed by all the information flowing towards you via a set of trusted connections — to free people, ideas and resources — from multiple networks.

If in a traditional organization nothing is free and everything has a defined role in some grand scheme, in a stream, everything tends steadily towards free as in both beer and speech. “Social” streams enabled by computing power in the cloud and on smartphones are not a compartmentalized location for a particular kind of activity. They provide an information and connection-rich context for all activity. Unlike organizations defined by boundaries, streams are what Acemoglu and Robinson call pluralist institutions.
In the land of the free, interdependence undermines Americans' motivation to act. Public campaigns that call upon people to think and act interdependently may undermine motivation for many Americans, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Austrian School: Individualism. The Long FAQ on LiberalismA Critique of the Austrian School of Economics: A closely related Austrian philosophy is methodological individualism. This means that all economic phenomena can be traced back to, and explained by, the actions of individuals. Even when individuals act on behalf of a group, or as part of a group, they are acting as individuals. Thus, "group behavior" is a false concept.

As political scientist Jon Elster argues: "A family may, after some discussion, decide on a way of spending its income, but the decision is not based on 'its' goals and 'its' beliefs, since there are no such things.
" (1) Even if the final budget is a compromise that does not correspond to the wish of any single family member, then members have nonetheless agreed to the compromise, since compromising is somehow more rewarding than not compromising.
Deep Democracy, Peer-to-Peer Production and Our Common Futures. * Paper: Deep democracy, peer-to-peer production and our common futures.

Jose Ramos. Futura, 2012. Jose Ramos presents his new essay on the future of democracy in a p2p context: “Earlier this year Dr. Vuokko Jarva, a futures scholar who works on consumer education to promote future consciousness and planetary responsibility and is developing new narrative approaches in futures studies, invited me to write an essay for the Finnish journal Futura (a publication of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies).
Emergence of Noopolitik. The Power of Power Laws. We’re shifting from a Gaussian world to a Paretian world, with profound implications for business.

Johann Gauss was a famous mathematician in the 18th century and Vilfredo Pareto was a great economist who lived across the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Future Perfect. What is a “peer progressive”?

Steven Johnson, in Future Perfect, describes a person who is neither right-wing nor left-wing, ignoring the labels of 20th century politics, and one who embraces the power of networks for the betterment of society. To be a peer progressive, then, is to believe that the key to continued progress lies in building peer networks in as many regions of modern life as possible: in education, health care, city neighborhoods, private corporations, and government agencies. When a need arises in society that goes unmet, our first impulse should be to build a peer network to solve that problem.

Some of these networks will rely heavily on technology, as Kickstarter does; while others will be built using older tools of community and communication, including that timeless platform of humans gathering in the same room and talking to one another. Take two groups of individuals and assign to each one some kind of problem to solve.
Collective Intelligence and Collective Leadership: Twin Paths to Beyond Chaos. 'Peer Progressives': Steven Johnson. Spy Kids - By Charles Stross. In the 21st century, the U.S.

National Security Agency (and other espionage agencies) face a storm of system-wide problems that I haven't seen anybody talking about. The problems are sociological, and they threaten to undermine the way the Western security state operates. The big government/civil service agencies are old. The NSA's roots stretch back to the State Department's "Black Chamber" (officially dissolved by Secretary of State Henry Stimson in 1929 with the immortal words "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail").
The New Economy. Liquid Democracy. What is New Mutualism?
It’s the little choices that matter.

Do you set up your own home office or join a co-working community? Shop at a chain grocery store or a local food co-op? Bank or credit union? We all face these decisions every day. The choice is deceptively simple -- go it alone or build something together. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned from freelancers -- your network is everything.
Mutual aid. Metadesign. The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity's Future?
Appearing in: Special Report This piece is the introduction to a new report on post-familialism from Civil Service College in Singapore, Chapman University, and Fieldstead and Company and authored by Joel Kotkin.

For most of human history, the family — defined by parents, children and extended kin — has stood as the central unit of society. In Europe, Asia, Africa and, later, the Americas and Oceania, people lived, and frequently worked, as family units.
Www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-570.pdf. U.S. Birth Rate Hit Historic Low. Americans had fewer babies in 2011 than in any year before, according to an annual summary of vital statistics.

In 2011, 3,953,593 babies were born in the U.S. -- 1% fewer than in 2010 and 4% fewer than in 2009, according to Brady Hamilton, PhD, of the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues at the agency and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That number, combined with population data, yielded a crude birth rate of 12.7 per 1,000 people, the lowest rate ever reported for the nation, they reported online and in the March 2013 issue of Pediatrics. The general fertility rate -- defined as the number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 through 44 -- also fell by 1%, to a record low of 63.2 in 2011, down from 64.1 in 2010. But the declines were not uniform according to age, the authors pointed out.

The birth rate among all teenagers (ages 15-19) fell by 8% from 2010 to 2011, reaching a historic low of 31.3 births per 1,000 women.
The Next America. By Paul Taylor Published April 10, 2014.

Www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/article_base_54. This map reflects the fact that a large number of basic values are closely correlated; they can be depicted in just two major dimensions of cross-cultural variation. ** Update ** Added supplementary data file. Each country is positioned according to its people's values and not its geographical location. To a large extent the two coincide, but the map measures cultural proximity, not geographical proximity. Thus, Australia, Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain are cultural neighbors, reflecting their relatively similar values, despite their geographical dispersion. The World Value Survey Cultural Map 2005-2008.